WASHINGTON — Sen. Chris Murphy’s online look-back at 2018 didn’t have much on weighty topics like his measure to halt U.S. assistance to Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. But it did include a recitation of 210,000 calls, emails and letters answered, the Red Sox series victory, 130 town halls and listening sessions, and two tweets “with my favorite boy band.”

Wait, what?

You might have missed it during a busy December, but Murphy offered moral support to famous ’90’s boy band 98 Degrees after their idling tour buses were kicked out of the Stop & Shop parking lot on Main Avenue in Norwalk.

The nearby boutiquey (and ironically named) Hotel Zero Degrees didn’t have room to park the buses. Complaints from shoppers got them booted off the property, kind of a bringdown for a group of 40-somethings seeking to recreate their ’90’s magic.

Murphy, who at 45 is about the same age as most of the band members, saw the story in the Norwalk Hour and tweeted: “Honestly, this is unacceptable. Whenever 98 Degrees comes to Connecticut they should be treated like the kings they indisputably are. I’m sorry Nick. Please come back soon.”

Nick is Nick Lachey, the band’s front man who went on to be a reality TV star in “Newlyweds” with his then wife, Jessica Simpson.

Lachey invited Murphy backstage for tea after their show at the Ridgefield Playhouse. But though he may be an unabashed fan of Lachey (at least his first solo album), Murphy couldn’t break away from busy times in Washington to be there.

That means whatever reservations he has about President Donald Trump — there’s plenty — Himes promises to search for common ground on highways, railways, airports — and, who knows, health care?

But that doesn’t mean Trump gets a free pass from Himes on his many assaults on the press, women’s rights, an independent judiciary and, heck, “basic human decency.”

Democrats who now control Congress don’t get a free pass either.

“I have heard the calls to climb into the mud with the president and his attack dogs,” Himes said. “I get it.”

But temptation notwithstanding, “I know that the way out of our national crisis lies in the insistent and universally felt (if oft-ignored) notion that we are better than this,” he said.

Nice balance if you can strike it, I guess.

Hard lesson learned

Elizabeth Esty’s online coda for her six years on Capitol Hill was a call for more young, sincere activists to run for office. Filmed in leafy season outside a row of Capitol Hill townhouses, Esty tells prospective office-holders “America needs you.”

But there was something vaguely prophetic about Esty saying: “Do not worry about whether you know enough. You do and what you don’t know, you’ll learn.”

Esty was no slouch in the policy department, coming to Washington in early 2013 after Yale law and sojourns on the Cheshire Town Council and the Connecticut General Assembly. But she was less sharp when it came to knowing what was going on under her own office roof.

Observers and admirers alike can only wonder how she missed years’ worth of clues that her chief of staff was abusive not just to one subordinate with whom he had an intimate relationship, but many other Esty staffers as well.

Failure to blow the whistle early on her chief of staff, Tony Baker, ultimately cost Esty an otherwise promising political future. She chose not to run for the seat that on Thursday gets occupied by Jahana Hayes, Waterbury’s own 2016 teacher of the year.

It’s unknown at this point whether Esty will reappear in public life. To be sure, comebacks are made successfully by those guilty of much more grievous errors in judgment than Esty. Or will she simply remain the answer to a future CT Politics trivia quiz?